This invention relates to test systems intended for test and measurement of the physical layer of high speed serial communication protocols and technologies.
Traditional testing of high speed communication channels requires multiple pieces of expensive test equipment. The test equipment is expected to perform testing of data on one or more particular communication channels. In some cases, currently available equipment is not able to perform a particular desired test because of a lack of understanding by the test instrument of a protocol defining a data format of the data to be tested. Various proprietary solutions using extensive test equipment at significant cost have been tried as well. In addition, proprietary software code must be specifically developed to coordinate the functioning of these products and allow the combination to perform a particular desired test. Thus, transceiver testing based on currently available test modes in the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) standards, for example, are very complicated to create in the lab due to equipment limitations.